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216 chapter five Difficult Embodiment Coming of Age in Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda Stories If illness destroys the normal ties between individuals and the social order, it also serves to reveal the nature of those ties. —Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret I hate love, she thought, as if this were the answer, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it. —Katherine Anne Porter Katherine Anne Porter’s “Miranda stories”—“The Old Order,” “Old Mortality ,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—trace the coming of age of three generations of southern women in and against a turn-of-the-century plantation order in East Texas and, later, a modernizing mass society in World War I– era Denver. The stories find a central, unifying predicament in the struggle of their youngest initiate, Miranda Rhea, to draw on the history of her foremothers and the lessons of her own experience in order to arrive at a viable model of womanhood upon which to found a mature identity. Along the way, Miranda , like her kinswomen before her, must negotiate the demands of “the old order,” Porter’s term for the traditional plantation regime with its hierarchical social and racial arrangements and strict gender codes, must come to a fuller awareness of a woman’s stake in this order and its toll on her. She must also come to grips with the ideological power of the romance plot, the story of love and marriage that, as Porter makes clear, plays a primary role in recruiting young white women into the old order and winning their acquiescence to the exalted but also severely constrained place they occupy in it. Porter makes no attempt to deny or evade the difficulty of her protagonist’s struggle for self-understanding and self-realization. More than once, she depicts Miranda in conscious or unconscious retreat from the painful insights she manages to glean into the mutually reinforcing institutions of patriarchal society. Difficult Embodiment 217 The Miranda stories find another and perhaps more curious unifying predicament in the struggles of their various heroines with illness, or what, in an attempt to be more precise, I will call difficult embodiment. In two of the three Miranda tales, the coming-of-age drama is specifically framed as an illness narrative. In “Old Mortality,” Miranda’s glamorous but enigmatic Aunt Amy is courted not only by the dashing Gabriel Breaux but by an even more ardent suitor, the tuberculosis bacillus, which seems to lead to her mysterious death shortly after her marriage. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Miranda’s love affair with a handsome young soldier and fellow Texan is shadowed by the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which ultimately claims both lovers among its victims. “The Old Order,” too, has its signature disease, the puerperal fever that haunts women of childbearing years among Miranda’s grandmother’s generation, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. And that specific malady is also accompanied in the vignettes of “The Old Order” by a whole host of somatic events stemming from the sexual and reproductive life of women, including menarche and menstruation, childbirth, lactation, stillbirth, and abortion. For these reasons, I want to avoid simply characterizing the Miranda stories as a whole as “illness narratives”; clearly, we need a discourse other than that of disease or physical handicap to describe the deeply and sometimes even painfully embodied experiences that go hand in hand with female sexual and reproductive health. So I have opted to put my argument in a slightly more awkward but hopefully more respectful way: the Miranda stories present the coming of age of young southern women as a drama of difficult embodiment. This representational strategy is significant for a number of reasons. One leading critic and theorist of body imagery, Sander Gilman, has argued that representations of illness work to mystify and compensate for the primary horror of actual illness (32), which Gilman defines as loss of control, “that flux experienced in our sensing the transience of our lives and bodies” (175). As I hope to demonstrate here, however, Porter uses representations of illness and other hyper-embodied experiences in exactly the opposite way, to demystify and materialize reigning cultural fictions of gender and by doing so to lay bare their somatic consequences, much as Faulkner does in Light in August with the racialized fiction of “blood” (see chapter 3). More speci fically, Porter develops illness stories and other dramas of difficult embodiment , including one explicit...

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